"'The evil that men do lives after them,'" the Muse said. She was laying on the sofa, and I thought she'd been asleep.

I looked up from my book, Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut. "What's that?"

"Shakespeare. Julius Caeser. 'The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.'"

"What brings forth this inspirational quote?" I asked. "Bad dream?"

She pulled the blanket up to her chin. The lamp beside me was the only light in the room, and in the gloom it was hard to make out her features. "Not a bad one. Not really a dream, either. I was just... contemplating. Thinking about legacies, that sort of thing."

"Whose? Yours?"

"Well... yeah. I guess."

"Not planning on dying any time soon, are you, Muse?"

"Who does?" She yawned and stretched beneath the blanket. "Just wondering where I fit on the good/evil scale. What people would say about me if I was hit by a bus tomorrow."

"I'd say about a forty-sixty ratio."

"Sixty percent evil?"

I shook my head. "Nah. Forty percent."

"Oh, good. I can live with that. As long as I'm better than half rotten, I can cope."

"Anyway, nobody will be saying anything bad about you at your funeral. They'll be saving it for the wake. That's where all the accusations of you being a dirty whore will come out."

"You be sure to stand up for me, mister."

"Of course. I'll remind them that you were a very clean whore, and the only thing dirty about you was your mind."

"Nice to know you'll be looking out for my legacy."

"Someone has to watch out for your dead ass, Muse."

"And you're just the necropheliac to do it, aren't you?"

I smiled. "Alive or dead, Muse, you have a powerful ass."

"Ick," she said. "Please do not refer in your eulogy to my 'powerful ass.'"

"Ass like a peach, Muse. A powerful peach."

"And you have a dumb ass, yourself," she said. She rolled over and faced away from me on the sofa.

"Go back to sleep, toots. We can talk about your ass some more in the morning."